Ten Days of Terror!: Horror Shorts

Film: Dementia; A Warning to the Curious; The Fall of the House of Usher (1928, American)
Format: Various sources, various players.

Fans of Mystery Science Theater 3000 are going to be at least vaguely aware of the existence of Bruno VeSota (or Bruno Ve Sota, as he is sometimes credited). Buttery fat dude VeSota appeared in five MST experiments, most notably to me personally as the chubby club owning foil of Daddy-O. He did one or two notable films, though, perhaps none more bizarre than Dementia from 1955, a film that, at 56 minutes, straddles the border of short and feature-length. What is most noteworthy about this film is the fact that there is no real dialogue included.

Dementia is very clearly an experimental film, if the lack of dialogue didn’t already indicate that. To put it bluntly, this film is an exploration of a descent into madness, a sort of fever dream following the experiences of an unreliable narrator and a bizarre and terrifying evening she spends in and around a seedy hotel, reliving her abusive past, and perhaps committing crimes in the present.

Ten Days of Terror!: Antiviral

Film: Antiviral
Format: Streaming video from Kanopy on Fire!

In the documentary Trekkies, there’s a moment where someone who works at conventions talks about the time that he sold a class of the “Q virus,” a glass of water that actor John de Lancie drank from on a panel while he was extremely sick. Someone in the crowd bought the glass and immediately drank the water, knowing that it was likely he would catch whatever illness de Lancie had at the time. That kind of thinking is at the heart of Antiviral, a movie made by Brandon Cronenberg but that could have easily been made by his father David.

The basic conceit behind Antiviral is that in the future, the idea of celebrity worship has metastasized into something far more obsessive and destructive. One of the main ways in which this is expressed is in the dealing of viruses and pathogens that infect celebrities. So, it’s not just that you can get COVID just like Tom Hanks did. You can be injected with the exact strain of the virus that he had, harvested from his cells. You’re not just getting the same thing; it’s like he’s infected you himself.

Ten Days of Terror!: Ghost Stories

Film: Ghost Stories
Format: Streaming video from AMC + through Amazon Prime on Fire!

Most film anthologies are horror anthologies. I think the reason for that is that horror movies are easier to do in short form. Oh, you can do a comedy this way, and I’ve seen a Western anthology as well, but horror movies are really about the scare. We don’t need to know a great deal about the person beyond the fact that they are in danger for us to care, and we don’t really need more than something creepy to give us the scares. Ghost Stories is a British anthology that gives us a framing story that connects the stories much more firmly that normally happens in this kind of film. It’s a fun premise, even if the ending is one I found very frustrating.

The framing story presents us with Philip Goodman (co-writer/co-director Andy Nyman) lives a lonely life despite having success as a professor and a television presenter who debunks spiritual claims and psychics a la James Randi. In truth, Goodman is more inspired by a Randi-like character named Charles Cameron, who was a debunker in the ‘70s. Goodman is invited to meet with Cameron and discovers that his childhood hero is essentially living in a mobile home, impoverished and ill. Cameron tells him that his life’s work is a joke because there are three cases he could never fully debunk.

Ten Days of Terror!: The Nameless

Film: The Nameless
Format: DVD from Hanover Public Library through interlibrary loan on basement television.

There is a thin line between what makes a movie a horror movie versus a thriller. In my own head, I tend to think of thrillers as films based more in the real world, while horror films tend to have more of a supernatural element. Of course, that’s a line that gets blurred a great deal, more on the horror side of things. There’s nothing supernatural about The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or The Silence of the Lambs (or Hostel for that matter), yet these are clearly horror films. The Nameless (called Los Sin Nombre in the original Spanish, and the copy I watched had the title as the Catalan Els sense nom) is a film that straddles the line between thriller and horror. There are hints of supernatural here, but are they real? Or is it just something that feels like the supernatural because we’ve been manipulated to think that way?

The film begins with the discovery of the body of a young girl. The body is found in a manhole by Spanish police, mutilated beyond recognition. The belief is that everything done to the body was done to mask her identity, but several clues—a bracelet with her name on it and the fact that one of her legs is shorter than the other—leads to her being identified as Angela Gifford. Her parents, Claudia (Emma Vilarasau) and Marc (Brendan Price) are naturally overcome with grief

Ten Days of Terror!: Altered

Film: Altered
Format: Internet video on Fire!

One of the constant problems of watching movies based on a list is that some of the movies will be incredibly difficult to find. I only got through the 1001 Movies list thanks to the fact that NetFlix was still sending out discs in the mail at the time, the catalogs of multiple local libraries, and the assistance of other people working on the same list of movies. While there are more streaming outlets these days, there are fewer other options. And, to be fair, a lot of movies would be easier to find if I was willing to pay to stream them. So, when I find something free on YouTube or DailyMotion, I’m going to watch. In this case, alien science fiction/horror movie Altered showed up on YouTube, so I took the opportunity to cross it off the list.

Altered has some real connection to any film that features any sort of alien attacker, but to me, it felt a great deal like Fire in the Sky. This isn’t aliens invading, as in Signs, but people dealing with abduction and a significant amount of body horror. This is far more a horror movie than it is a science fiction movie. There wouldn’t be a huge difference in how this film works if you turned the alien into a werewolf.

Ten Days of Terror!: Resident Evil: Afterlife

Film: Resident Evil: Afterlife
Format: DVD from Sycamore Public Library on basement television.

Here we go again. When you have a touch of the ‘tism, there are things beyond your control that guide at least some of your actions. In my case, it’s a necessity of being complete on things, which is one of the reasons (honestly, probably the reason) that I watch movies based on curated lists. The They Shoot Zombies list has a sublist of, not surprisingly, zombie movies, most of which I have seen, but it felt like another fun list to pursue, and here we are. It’s why I’ve been watching Resident Evil movies against my better judgment, and why I’m now getting through the fourth one, Resident Evil: Afterlife. For this installment, Paul W.S. Anderson has returned to the director’s chair, not that it’s going to make that much of a difference.

It won’t be surprising to hear that Resident Evil: Afterlife has the exact same problem as its two predecessors. Picking up from the previous film, Alice (Milla Jovovich) and her clones attack the main Umbrella Corporation facility in Tokyo, wiping out everyone aside from the chairman, Albert Wesker (Shawn Roberts), who has injected himself with the T-virus. The original Alice has stowed away on Wesker’s escape craft, but naturally he’s going to continue to survive, and in this case, he’s going to inject Alice with an anti-virus that removes all of her supernatural abilities. This doesn’t seem to remove her ability to survive their plane crashing into a mountain, an accident from which she walks away essentially unscathed.

Ten Days of Terror!: Resident Evil: Extinction

Film: Resident Evil: Extinction
Format: DVD from Sycamore Public Library on basement television.

I’d love to say lots of nice things about Resident Evil: Extinction, but that’s not the world that we live in. As much as I am personally and oddly fascinated by the career of Paul W.S. Anderson and as much as I will apologize for a lot of his films, I can’t bring myself to say a lot nice about this film, which was written and produced by him. There is a sense to this film that the story isn’t really that important, and even the franchise doesn’t matter much. Instead, the entire point of the film is about spectacle for its own sake.

I promise I’m going to go into some detail on this, but I want to set a sort of general idea of what I’m talking about first. Resident Evil: Extinction is a collection of scenes that are connected to each other, and there is a semblance of plot here, but very little sense of the larger story or the reality of the world that the film wants to exist in. It’s an odd little snapshot that exists for its own sake without a sense of anything larger. Things happen because they would “look cool” on screen. Stupid decisions are made for the sake of spectacle with no sense of reality, even the reality projected by the film series.

Ten Days of Terror!: Resident Evil: Apocalypse

Film: Resident Evil: Apocalypse
Format: DVD from Sycamore Public Library on basement television.

There is a part of me that is fascinated with the career of Paul W.S. Anderson. He’s certainly earnest in what he does; he’s just not very good at it that often. Then again, our boy Paul has managed to stay married to Milla Jovovich for 16 years, starting after he directed her in Resident Evil. He took a break from directing in that film series, but he wrote pretty much the entire series. So, while he’s not on the hook for everything in the first sequel, Resident Evil: Apocalypse, he’s certainly on the hook for some of it.

The problems with this film are legion, and we can start with the name. This is the second film in the franchise and we’re already at the Apocalypse stage? In another medium, this is where I would cue the “That escalated quickly” meme from Anchorman. It would certainly feel like there should be something in between. Instead, the title really goes to the biggest issue with the film.

Ten Days of Terror!: Next of Kin

Film: Next of Kin
Format: Streaming video from Tubi on Fire!

There are some lessons that I am slow to learn when it comes to this blog. The They Shoot Zombies list is a cast in point. Sometimes I will watch a horror or horror-adjacent movie and won’t write up a full review or any review at all, and then it shows upon the Zombies list, and I’m forced to rewatch it. Some time ago, I watched a documentary on Ozploitation films that included some highlights of Aussie horror films. One of the ones discussed at length was Next of Kin, a film that I watched and then didn’t review. Well, now it’s on the Zombies list, and here we are.

Next of Kin has a pretty standard set-up for a horror movie, albeit with a twist or two. Linda (Jacki Kerin) inherits the estate of her estranged mother, but it’s not just a simple ramshackle mansion that Linda has inherited. The structure, called Montclare, is a retirement community, so Linda hasn’t just inherited a house, but has a bunch of elderly boarders there on the day she moves in. On that same day, an old woman named Mrs. Ryan moves in as well, brought in by her son Kelvin (Bernadette Gibson and Robert Ratti). Shortly thereafter, one of the elderly residents is discovered drowned in a bathtub.

Ten Days of Terror!: Just Before Dawn

Film: Just Before Dawn
Format: Streaming video from Plex on Fire!

I tend to write somewhere between 750 and 1000 words for these reviews, give or take. Sometimes I write a little less, but not much, and sometimes I have a lot more to say. The problem with writing longer reviews is that sometimes I come across a movie that doesn’t really have a lot that I can say about it. Just Before Dawn is that kind of movie. This is a slasher movie from the early eighties. Have you seen a late-’70s/early-’80s slasher before? If the answer is yes, you’ve seen probably 90% of this movie. That’s not an exaggeration.

A slasher like Just Before Dawn needs to start us with a kill or two to get things going. To that end, we are introduced to Ty (Mike Kellin) and his nephew Vachel (Charles Bartlett), who are drunk and at least pretending to hunt. They investigate what looks like an abandoned church. Suddenly, their truck appears to have its parking brake release, and it careens down the hill, sending Ty after it. In the church, a mysterious shape appears and stabs Vachel in the junk. When that shape walks out of the church, Ty runs off.

Ten Days of Terror!: The Hills Have Eyes (2006)

Film: The Hills Have Eyes (2006)
Format: Streaming video from Kanopy on Fire!

I’m always a little suspicious of remakes. Sure, there are a number of remakes that are better than the original film (the version of The Maltese Falcon that everyone knows is the third version of that story, for instance). I’m still wary, though, because even when the remake is good, it’s usually not as good as the first one. I like the idea of filmmakers doing remakes of movies that were bad but had good ideas rather than remaking classics. This is especially true of formative films in a genre. All of this is to say that I watched the 2006 remake of The Hills Have Eyes, and I have some things to say about it.

The basic premise of this remake is essentially the same as the original film. A family on vacation is driving through the American southwest, specifically through the desert around where the nuclear tests were done and find themselves stranded and attacked by a family of mutants who have been affected terribly by the radiation from the bomb tests around Alamogordo.

Ten Days of Terror!: Terror Train

Film: Terror Train
Format: Streaming video from Hoopla on Fire!

Halloween changed the horror movie industry in a lot of ways, and popularized the slasher subgenre. It also created the scream queen career of Jamie Lee Curtis. It had some real negative effects as well. For a few years in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, you couldn’t swing a dead cat without hitting a teen slasher movie that put her in the role of the final girl or at least final girl-adjacent. Sometimes, you got something fun like The Fog or Road Games. Sometimes you got derivative garbage like Terror Train.

In the nearly 16(!) years I have written this blog, I have watched a lot of garbage. I’ve seen a lot of embarrassing movies, some of which have been forced on me by others as challenges, some from my old podcast, and more than a few from various lists I’ve pursued. There are clearly worse movies than Terror Train that I have watched and written about, but there aren’t a lot that feel this lazy. That, more than anything is what is disappointing about this movie. Terror Train is unquestionably not a good movie, but it’s a far greater sin that it feels like it was written over a weekend by someone who was simultaneously distracted by the television.

Ten Days of Terror!: Fear Street Part One: 1994

Film: Fear Street Part One: 1994
Format: DVD from Sycamore Public Library on basement television.

In an interview, discussing his career and specifically Scream (if I remember correctly), Wes Craven said that with a horror movie, if you give your audience a really good scare in the opening of the film, you don’t really have to scare them again like that until the end of the film. The first of the Fear Street movies, Fear Street Part One: 1994, has taken this lesson to heart. We have a very solid slasher movie opening, and that really does carry us all the way through to the end, which matches the energy of the opening sequence.

Obviously, based on the name, this is a film that takes place in 1994, and we’re going to really hit that hard in the opening bit, which takes place in a shopping mall at closing time. It’s a cultural snapshot that really sells the time period. No generation was more acclimated to mall culture than Gen-X, and director Leigh Janiak is tail-end of Gen-X. If you were in high school in the ’80s or ‘90s, there’s a better than average chance that you worked in a mall at some point, and you know that feeling of being one of the last people to leave, walking through that empty place, feeling like there’s something waiting for you around the next corner as you head out to your car.

Ten Days of Terror!: Noroi (The Curse)

Film: Noroi: The Curse
Format: Streaming video from AMC+ through Amazon Prime on Fire!

When I started this blog, the biggest genre/style of film that I struggled with was musicals. I have definitely softened on musicals a great deal, and while a musical is rarely going to be my choice, there are plenty that I like. These days, the style I struggle with the most is found footage. There are certainly some found footage movies, or movies done in real-time online (a rough equivalent of found footage) that I think are great. The problem is that it’s also the style that is most accessible to lazy filmmakers. This being the case, I tend to go into them wary, even when they come with a lot of acclaim, like Noroi: The Curse.

Noroi (which is how I will refer to this from this point forward) is absolutely a found footage movie, but it has the benefit of being a found footage movie with the conceit of having been edited. That sounds like a contradiction, but it truly is not. What we have is a documentary filmmaker noted for explorations of the paranormal and his final work. So we have an edited story that doesn’t have to simply work in real-time or be filmed in order, but with the feel of a found footage movie.

Ten Days of Terror!: Hungry Wives

Film: Hungry Wives (Season of the Witch)
Format: Streaming video from Kanopy on Fire!

Like it or not, George Romero is going to be forever associated with his zombie movies. To be fair, they are his greatest cultural legacy for a reason. He did more than rewrite the world’s concept of zombies, though. Romero made some other oddball movies like Knightriders and The Crazies as well. Hungry Wives (also called Season of the Witch is one of those oddball movies. You’d be forgiven for thinking it was another zombie movie, given the word “hungry” in the title.

This is a Romero movie, though, given the amount of social commentary that is at play here. Hungry Wives is about ennui, about feeling disaffected and disconnected from your own life. The film follows the sort of awakening of Joan Mitchell (Jan White), who is dissatisfied with her life as a housewife, her lack of connection to her daughter, and her unhappy, unpleasant marriage to her husband Jack (Bill Thunhurst). Looking for something more, Joan starts to explore witchcraft, which turns out to be more true and more effective than she would have thought.

Ten Days of Terror!: We Are Still Here

Film: We Are Still Here
Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on Fire!

There are times when I am frustrated with myself for writing as much as I do on these reviews. It’s great when there’s a lot to say about a particular movie, and in fact writing 800-1000 words on a movie is sometimes a little restrictive. But then there are times when I don’t have a great deal to say. That’s not always a bad thing in terms of what it means for the film. In this case, We Are Still Here is a movie that deserves to be talked about for all of the right reasons. There’s just honestly not a lot that has to be said about it.

The main issue going in is that this is going to be a list of tropes. This is very clearly a haunted house movie for starters. It’s also a movie where outsiders move into a small town and end up in the town’s creepy haunted house, filled with terrible lore of the former occupants. And, naturally, the house is going to be filled with some unquiet ghosts. That’s the set up, and in truth, the film isn’t going to deviate from this much, but it’s going to play within those constraints surprisingly well.

Ten Days of Terror!: The Whip and the Body

Film: The Whip and the Body
Format: Streaming video from Kanopy on Fire!

I do have a fondness for Gothic horror movies. I’m not sure if it’s the setting and the costuming, the stateliness and relative genteelness of the stories, or the presence of Christopher Lee in so many of them. While it’s certainly not the entirety of the genre, it’s hard not to view horror from the ‘60s without feeling that all of them took place a century previous in castles somewhere in Europe. That’s not the case, of course, but there are a hell of a lot of films that involve fancy people living in castles in the 18th or 19th century. A film like The Whip and the Body (or La frusta e il corpo if you prefer) certainly fits that whole Gothic idea, but certainly puts the idea of genteelness in question.

As you might get from the title, The Whip and the Body is very much a film about sadomasochism. Kurt Menliff (Christopher Lee) returns to his family’s castle after many years ostensibly to congratulate his brother Christian (Tony Kendall) on his marriage. Christian has married Nevenka (Daliah Lavi), who was a former lover of Kurt’s. The truth is that Kurt is a known sadist and no one in the castle is happy with his return. Particularly enraged are Kurt’s father Count Menliff (Gustavo De Nardo) and Giorgia (Harriet Medin), the family servant who blames Kurt for the suicide death of her daughter.

Ten Days of Terror!: Nightmare Castle

Film: Nightmare Castle (Amanti d’Oltretomba)
Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on Fire!

Old Gothic horror movies are very much their own thing. There’s a sense that they desperately want to be scary and while they often come with a weird sense of torture behind the scenes with a soupçon of Poe-style necrophilia, but they’re not really scary in the modern sense. There may not be a more gothic-y Gothic horror film than Nightmare Castle (Amanti d’Oltretomba, if you prefer, sometimes called The Faceless Monster, and for some reason called The Night of the Doomed on Tubi), in large part because of the presence of the great Barbara Steele, the queen of the 1960s Euro-trash castle-based horror film.

We’re going to dive head-first into the illicit sex angle with this one. Scientist Stephen Arrowsmith (Paul Muller) has a loveless marriage with his wife Muriel (Barbara Steele). He plans a trip away from their estate, but actually doubles back to catch Muriel making the beast with two backs in the greenhouse with the gardener David (Rik Battaglia). Not willing to stand for such treatment, Arrowsmith tortures both of them and eventually kills them, only to discover that he has not been named the heir to Muriel’s fortune. The actual heir is Muriel’s step-sister Jenny (also Barbara Steele). Needing a new plan, Stephen takes the opportunity to remove the hearts of Muriel and David (for, honestly, plot reasons). He also uses their blood to create a serum to rejuvenate his servant Solange (Helga Liné).

Ten Days of Terror!: Beyond the Darkness

Film: Beyond the Darkness (Buio Omega)
Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on Fire!

Some movies have a plot and some movies are Italian-style horror. Of national horror cinemas, Italian is, in my opinion, the most overrated. As I have said many a time before, a lot of Italian horror films appear to have been created by someone coming up with a couple of scenes (like the stained glass hanging scene and the barbed wire room in Suspiria) and then loosely tying them together with scenes that may or may not have an actual plot connected to them. With Beyond the Darkness (or Buio Omega if you prefer), there’s not really even that. There’s more an idea of what a couple of characters could be like as a starting point and then, well, that’s it.

I mean this pretty much literally seems to be the case with this film. Someone had an idea for a couple of characters (almost certainly not more than two of them), and then just…built something around them. Rich dude Frank (Kieran Canter, and the character was Francesco in the original Italian) lives a life of wealth and privilege, one he inherited after the death of his parents when he was young. He lives with his wet nurse Iris (Franca Stoppi), who clearly wants more than a nursing relationship with Frank, since he’s young, wealthy, and attractive. Frank, however, wants to marry Anna (Cinzia Monreale). Desperate to prevent this, Iris hires a witch to kill Anna with a voodoo doll, and it works.

Ten Days of Terror!: Hatchet for the Honeymoon

Film: Hatchet for the Honeymoon
Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on Fire!

One of the things that made Peeping Tom such a transgressive movie is the fact that we know immediately who the killer is. The rest of the movie then attempts to get the audience to sympathize with someone who they know to be a murderer. Hatchet for the Honeymoon does half of this. It tells us exactly who the killer is in the opening few minutes, and then honestly doesn’t care if we sympathize or not. It’s more about how things play out than it is about us caring about whether or not the psychotic killer survives or gets what he wants.

So it’s absolutely not a spoiler when I tell you that when we are introduced to John Harrington (Stephen Forsyth) and he immediately tells us that he is a psychopath responsible for the murder in the opening scene of the film. What he tells us is that he suffered some terrible childhood trauma, and for some reason, when he murders a bride with a cleaver (and it’s definitely a cleaver and not a hatchet), he gets a glimpse of that trauma and gets closer to remembering exactly what happened.

Ten Days of Terror!: Hocus Pocus

Film: Hocus Pocus
Format: Streaming video from Disney Plus on Fire!

Some movies need to be seen not in the context of when they were made, but at the right moment in life. See The Breakfast Club as a senior in high school, and you’ll likely love it. See it when you’re 40, and you wonder why those kids are so whiny. That’s definitely the case with Hocus Pocus. If this had existed when I was a kid, I would have probably loved it. Had I seen it in 1993 when it came out (unlikely), my opinion would have been different. Seeing it now? I get the appeal, but the appeal is not for me.

This is a Disney movie, of course, so it’s not going to be terribly threatening for the audience, although it goes darker in places than I would have guessed going in. It’s also clearly played for a great deal of comedy, which I did expect. My issues with it are neither of those aspects of it, but because it very much feels dated in its characters. There is a particular type if Disney movie kid that existed in this era, and Hocus Pocus might well be the apotheosis of this persona. I promise that we’ll get there.

Ten Days of Terror!: Fresh

Film: Fresh
Format: Streaming video from Hulu Plus on Fire!

Because I feel like I am always catching up on movies, there are always movies that “everyone” watches, especially on streaming services, that I don’t see for a few years. Such is the case with the Hulu movie Fresh, which released about three years ago. This is a movie pushing a half million reviews on Letterboxd, but I’m just getting to it now.

I’m honestly surprised that this movie exists as a movie on Hulu and not a dedicated horror platform like Shudder. Fresh is a deeply upsetting movie for a lot of reasons. With a few minor changes, this is straight out of the French Extremity movement. All that’s lacking here is a lot of gore, and Fresh makes up for that in a number of other ways. So, while we’re not specifically going to see the sort of things you might in Martyrs or L’Interieur, there’s still plenty of stomach churning joy to come. It’s worth noting that it’s impossible to talk about this movie without spoiling it, so consider everything after this point to be under a spoiler tag.

Ten Days of Terror!: Deathgasm

Film: Deathgasm
Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on Fire!

I love horror movies, but there are two subgenres of horror that I tend to struggle with. I have a long history of being frustrated with anthology films, since they don’t really provide enough depth to genuinely care about the characters, and I stand by the idea that horror works best when we actually care about the characters. The second subgenre is horror/comedy. Most horror/comedies either aren’t scary, aren’t funny, or both. I actually love a good horror comedy, but the good ones are so rare that I’m always a little nervous going in. Deathgasm, though, had solid bona fides, so I was prepared to enjoy it.

The joy of Deathgasm is that it does exactly what you want a horror comedy to do. While it’s not particularly scary in the sense that you’ll sleep with the light on or something like that, there are plenty of gross out moments that feel like an homage to Dead Alive. It’s also genuinely funny in places. It gives us characters that we can like, and while there are moments where people act like idiots, most of them aren’t completely over the top. It’s funny in the way Shaun of the Dead or Slither was funny, and that’s a good thing.

Ten Days of Terror!: The Wolf of Snow Hollow

Film: The Wolf of Snow Hollow
Format: Streaming video from Kanopy on Fire!

There’s an interview with Joe Dante talking about The Howling, one of the better werewolf movies around. In that interview, Dante says that they had to hide the fact that it was a werewolf movie in advertisements because people would have thought it was corny and trite. How times have changed. Werewolf movies are cool when they’re done well, and they are surprisingly ripe to be done as horror comedy. The Wolf of Snow Hollow has embraced all of these facts. It’s not hiding that this is a werewolf movie, and it shouldn’t.

One of the things that most werewolf movies have going for them is that they really turn on the idea of isolation. An American Werewolf in London, putting a lycanthrope into the middle of a big city, is the exception to the rule. Werewolves do better in the middle of nowhere, where anyone can be the monster, but the list of suspects is relatively small.

Ten Days of Terror!: The Man They Could Not Hang

Film: The Man They Could Not Hang
Format: Internet video on Fire!

I am a horror fan, but I’m finding more and more that I’m shying away from things that are explicitly and gratuitously gory. I don’t mind gore when it makes sense in the narrative, but I don’t see the point of the fan service when it’s there just to be there. Because of this, there is a real comfort in horror films from the 1930s and ‘40s. The Man They Could Not Hang came out in the glorious film year of 1939, and it’s one of those films that is right in the wheelhouse of its star, Boris Karloff. There’s a menace here that works really well—remade today this would be a lot bloodier, but it’s a story that would work today.

Like many horror films of the time, The Man They Could Not Hang is rooted firmly in the idea of the progress of medicine and medical experimentation. Dr. Henryk Savaard (Karloff) has experimented with the idea of bringing the dead back to life. He’s gotten a young medical student name Bob Roberts (Stanley Brown) to be his test subject—he’ll be temporarily killed and kept alive with an artificial heart. The idea is that this would allow doctors to perform procedures impossible on living patients, and then allow those patients to be revived.

Ten Days of Terror!: Doctor X

Film: Doctor X
Format: Streaming video from Tubi on Fire!

Sometimes I go into movies knowing nothing about what I’m going to see and what I get is almost beyond description. Doctor X has so many odd things about it that feel like they can’t really be a part of a movie. For instance, this is a film from 1932, and the studio created both color and black-and-white prints; color for the big markets, black-and-white for the small towns (I watched the color version). It’s very clearly a pre-Code film since cannibalism, murder, and hints of prostitution are points of the plot. It also features the wildly under-used Fay Wray in a negligee.

Another odd bit about Doctor X is the name. There actually is a “Doctor X” in the film, and if you thought that he was going to be the bad guy, you’ve been misled. That would be a common assumption—there’s a bunch of films named after the villain and far fewer named after a character who is only kind of the main good guy and kind of the main character. There’s weird science, a weirder monster, a nosy reporter, and did I mention Fay Wray in a nightie?

Ten Days of Terror!: The Lodger: A Tale of the London Fog (1927)

Film: The Lodger: A Tale of the London Fog
Format: Streaming video from Amazon Prime on Fire!

Every great career starts somewhere. In the case of Alfred Hitchcock, his directorial career started with a couple of romances. He really came into his own with The Lodger: A Tale of the London Fog (hereafter referred to as simply The Lodger), the first of his movies to take a deep dive into suspense. The Lodger is a silent, but even here there are the clear beginnings in what would eventually be many of Hitchcock’s signature themes and ideas—mistaken identity, murder, and obsession with blondes, just for starters.

The Lodger is very clearly a riff on Jack the Ripper, as is evident from the opening scene when a young woman is murdered. As we will discover, the young woman is the seventh victim of a serial killer known as “The Avenger” based on a calling card the murderer leaves at the scene of the crime. The killer acts every Tuesday night, and only kills young, blonde women.

Ten Days of Terror!: Waxworks (Das Wachsfigurenkabinett)

Film: Waxworks (Das Wachsfigurenkabinett)
Format: Streaming video from Hoopla on various players.

I seem unable to get away from horror anthologies. Waxworks, or Das Wachsfigurenkabinett if you like the German, is potentially the first horror film anthology in existence, but I’m not as versed on silent film history as I should be to be able to make that as a definitive claim. In truth, since this isn’t really that scary and only one of the three stories is overtly horror, it’s possible that someone might claim a later film as having that title. Regardless, there are certainly some clear sense that this has at least horror intentions. It might be better thought of as a prototype rather than the real thing.

The framing story is, unsurprisingly, going to take place in a wax museum. The proprietor of a wax museum (John Gottowt) and his daughter Eva (Olga Belajeff) put out an ad for a writer. It’s answered by a man called only “The Poet” (William Dieterle), who is engaged to write backstories for three of the museums exhibits: Harun Al-Rashid, Ivan the Terrible, and Spring-Heeled Jack, the silent version of Jack The Ripper, renamed to avoid problems with the censors. The Poet notices that the figure of Harun Al-Rashid is missing an arm, and this is the entry point for the first tale.

Ten Days of Terror!: The Children (2008)

Film: The Children (2008)
Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on Fire!

A lot of horror movies get a lot of traction from murderous little kids. This can range from the camp (Bloody Birthday) to the alien (Village of the Damned) to the demonic (The Omen). Years ago, Bravo ran a special about the 100 scariest moments in horror movies. In the section on The Others, John Landis commented that filmmakers always use British kids to be creepy. Well, we’re going to get murderous British kids in the 2008 version of The Children. I mean, it’s right there in the name.

Naturally, we’re going to be isolated. A group of friends and their kids have gotten together for a New Year’s Eve party in the middle of nowhere. Arriving at the start of the film are Elaine (Eva Birthistle), her husband Jonah (Stephen Campbell Moore), their children Miranda and Paulie (Eva Sayer and William Howes), and Elaine’s teenaged daughter from a previous relationship, Casey (Hannah Tointon). Casey doesn’t want to be there and doesn’t feel connected to anyone there really. She is very clearly set up as our final girl in the opening moments of the film. The people they are visiting are Elaine’s sister Chloe (Rachel Shelley), her husband Robbie (Jeremy Sheffield), and their children Leah and Nicky (Rafiella Brookes and Jake Hathaway).

Ten Days of Terror!: Little Shop of Horrors (1986)

Film: Little Shop of Horrors (1986)
Format: Streaming video from Tubi on various players

There are a few movies that I think are litmus tests in the sense that if you don’t like them, there’s either something fundamentally wrong with you, or you are dedicated to being a contrarian for the attention. One such movie is the 1986 version of Little Shop of Horrors, by far the more famous of the two versions of this story. The original, a weird little Roger Corman project, is entertaining for what it is, but the Frank Oz version from 1986 is the film adaptation of the off-Broadway stage production based on the original movie. If you can’t find something to like in this, you should probably contact a therapist.

I don’t say that lightly. While Little Shop of Horrors isn’t going to be everyone’s favorite movie, I find it difficult to believe that there are people who could watch this and not find themselves entertained by it. The characters are fun, the premise is a great one, and the songs are, to quote the kids of today, bangers.

Ten Days of Terror!: Leprechaun

Film: Leprechaun
Format: Streaming video from Amazon Prime on Fire!

You watch a lot of movies, you end up watching a lot of stupid movies. That’s going to be true for each genre, but probably the most when it comes to comedies and horror movies. It’s been some time since I’ve seen anything as embarrassingly dumb as Leprechaun. Known these days at least in part for being one of the first starring roles for Jennifer Aniston, and specifically Jennifer Aniston pre-nose job (to be fair, it was done for medical reasons), there honestly aren’t a ton of reasons to watch it.

It's kind of a shame, too, because there are real horror movies that could be made about the fae that could be absolutely terrifying. Even the “good” fae creatures are often uncaring and capricious, and according to the folklore, the nasty ones are truly horrifying. What we get instead of that is Warwick Davis in heavy make-up riding on a tricycle. And somehow, there’s a Leprechaun 2 and 3, Leprechaun in Space, two Leprechaun in the Hood movies, a reboot, and another sequel.

Ten Days of Terror!: Slugs

Film: Slugs (Slugs, muerte viscosa)
Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on Fire!

What’s the dumbest movie monster? It’s a surprisingly competitive field. You have the carrot-shaped alien from It Conquered the World!, for instance, but if we stick with more real-world creatures there are still going to be some serious contenders. You might go with The Attack of the Giant Leeches, or perhaps The Killer Shrews. Both of these probably pale in comparison with Night of the Lepus and its horde of giant bunnies. But we’d have to give serious consideration to the central beastie in Slugs, or Slugs, muerte viscosa in its original name.

This is a killer slug movie. I’ve watched it and I still can’t believe that that is a sentence I have actually typed. This is a movie where the monster that will be plaguing people is a massive horde of meat-eating giant slugs. When I call them “giant slugs,” I’m not talking about something the size of a pit bull or even the size of a chihuahua. These are maybe footlong hot dog sized. That’s plenty big for a slug, of course, but we’re not talking about things that can tip over a car. Even more entertaining is the fact that this isn’t a made-for-cinema story. It’s actually based on a real book that was produced by a real publisher.

Ten Days of Terror!: A Horrible Way to Die

Film: A Horrible Way to Die
Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on Fire!

Low-budget filmmaking is aways interesting to me because it often requires the filmmaker to be a lot more creative with how they tell the story. I remember seeing an interview with Sam Raimi talking about this, saying that with the first Evil Dead movies, they had to figure out creative ways to get the shots they wanted, but with a budget, you just throw money at the problem. A Horrible Way to Die is a film that honestly pushes the limit of what can/should be expected in low-budget filmmaking.

I genuinely don’t want to come off as a snob here, because for whatever reason, director Adam Wingard—who has done Godzilla movies—has evidently decided that “low budget” also means “amateurish.” Now, to be fair, this was an early film in his filmography, and it wasn’t until he’d been around for a bit that he got to do things like Godzilla vs. Kong. That might explain some of this, but it doesn’t explain the fact that he seems to be dead set against 1) letting the camera sit still for 10 seconds and 2) focus. I mean that second part literally—it’s not that the film isn’t focusing on a story; it’s that the camera is literally out of focus in a lot of shots.

Ten Days of Terror!: The Guest

Film: The Guest
Format: DVD from Cortland Public Library on basement television.

It’s fun when a movie goes in a direction that you don’t expect. Because The Guest is on the They Shoot Zombies list, I knew this would eventually turn into a horror movie, but I wasn’t sure exactly how it was going to turn into a horror movie. On the surface, this looks like it could be a lot of things, and while thriller is certainly a possibility (and it’s closer to a thriller in a lot of ways than straight horror), there are moments when it looks like it might be a comedy or even a romance. I respect that in a film. Keep the audience guessing.

The Guest doesn’t start out like a horror movie, but we’re going to get some real hints that it’s going to dive head-first into horror. We begin with the realization that the Peterson family has lost a son in military service. Shortly after this, a man named David Collins (Dan Stevens) arrives and tells them that he knew their son in the service. David is good-looking and plenty charming and has soon gotten Laura Peterson (Sheila Kelley) to invite him to stay with them for a few days. David’s claim is that he promised Laura’s son Caleb that he would look after them.

Ten Days of Terror!: Twisted Nerve

Film: Twisted Nerve
Format: Streaming video from Plex on Fire!

There is a long history of films where a male character becomes obsessed with a woman and does everything he can to get close to her, causing death and mayhem along the way. Twisted Nerve is another in that long line of films. It’s disturbing in the same way that Peeping Tom is disturbing, and for a lot of the same reasons, although this is far less extreme. However, what it gives up in shock value, it makes up by placing former child actor Hayley Mills in the role of stalking victim

One of the problems with films that explore mental illness is that it frequently gets a great deal of it wrong, often simplifying things far too much to get to a desired ending. Hitchcock, with films like Marnie and Spellbound might have been the worst for this, but it’s a consistent problem—mental illness is rarely depicted accurately or fairly. Twisted Nerve probably isn’t that accurate, either (not a psychologist, so I can’t really speak to it with much experience or knowledge), but it at least presents us with something interesting. It is nice to know, however, that the film begins with a disclaimer that people with Downs Syndrome are not dangerous and are not connected to psychosis or criminality.

Ten Days of Terror!: Psycho II

Film: Psycho II
Format: Blu-Ray from Marengo-Union Library through interlibrary loan on rockin’ flatscreen.

It’s dangerous to make a sequel for a classic movie. No matter what, your film is going to be compared with the classic. There are rare exceptions where the sequel meets or exceeds the original--The Godfather part II or Aliens, for instance, but more often than not, you’re going to end up with Highlander II: The Quickening or Exorcist II: The Heretic. So it was brave to do Psycho II a good couple of decades after Hitchcock’s film. To make a sequel like this, you’re going to have to dive into some lore, make a few changes to the original story that might rub people the wrong way, and find a way to keep the audience guessing when they are already sure they know how the story is going to go.

With Psycho II, the problems are legion. All of the problems of making a sequel are there, and there are a number of additional issues as well. How do you make Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) sympathetic again? Since your audience is almost certainly going to know the classic shock ending of the original film, how do you give them new shocks? Since the audience already knows the story about Norman and his mother, how do you make something new that people will accept?

Ten Days of Terror!: Not of This Earth

Film: Not of This Earth
Format: Streaming video from Mometu on Fire!

Say what you will about Roger Corman, there were a few things that he did really well. He had an eye for talent (check out the number of directors he discovered), and he could tell a story efficiently, if not always well. Not of This Earth is one of those mid-‘50s sci-fi potboilers that always appeared on a double bill. The goal of the movie is to give the audience a weird tale, a scare or two, and a shock, even if it doesn’t make a great deal of sense, and it does that pretty well.

One of the things I love about science fiction and horror from this era is exactly that sense of nuttiness. Writers and directors could make the science as bizarre and nonsensical as they wanted if it allowed them to give the audience a fright. And let’s be honest here—the audience for pictures like Not of This Earth were not Mom and Dad, but teens who probably spent more time making out than watching what was on the screen. And so, Not of This Earth will give us a few Roger Corman regulars, some bad science, and aliens with inexplicable powers and anatomy. What more could you want?

Ten Days of Terror!: Alucarda

Film: Alucarda
Format: Streaming video from Mometu on Fire!

When you watch movies from a list, as I have now done since the start of 2010, you often have to look in a lot of places to find them. I use more than a dozen streaming services (many of which are free—I’m not made of money) as well as four local libraries and the Illinois Prairie Cat library system to track things down, plus a variety of websites like YouTube and DailyMotion for a few rarities. So, when the only way to watch a movie is yet another streaming site, I’m going to give it a shot. And so I watched Alucarda on Mometu, which has just started showing up as an option for streaming.

This is also a case where I’m once again watching a movie that I have more or less seen before, since it is the sixth cinematic interpretation of this story that I have seen. Alucarda is yet again a version of the novella Carmilla, and I see that I’ve got a couple more versions of it to come. Seriously, there’s a lot of repetition in vampire movies.

Ten Days of Terror!: Fascination

Film: Fascination
Format: Streaming video from Amazon Prime on Fire!

There are times when I get very interested in a movie without knowing a great deal about it more than the title and a picture or two. That’s certainly the case with Fascination. My curiosity about it came from a fairly iconic picture (shown above) and the fact that, try as I might, I couldn’t find a copy of it. Suddenly, Fascination is streaming on Prime, so it seemed like a good chance to indulge myself in watching a film that had eluded me for so long.

There are a lot of ways that Fascination can be described, or at least a lot of different descriptors can be used for it. It’s clearly folk horror, an erotic thriller, and possibly a vampire film, although this is less explicitly true and more simply implied. Also, rather daring for 1979, there are clearly a few bisexual characters and a scene or two of lesbianism. In short, this isn’t one to watch when your parents are in town or when the kids might walk into the room.

Ten Days of Terror!: Le viol du vampire

Film: Le viol du vampire (The Rape of the Vampire)
Format: Streaming video from Kanopy on Fire!

I go into every movie that I watch with hope. There are some movies that I know are going to hurt me (see: Martyrs, Salo, L’Interieur), but there is always hope that I will emerge on the other side having gotten something from the viewing. That happens often enough that I continue to push myself in what I view. So, when I get something like Le viol du vampire (The Rape of the Vampire in English), I can’t help but be disappointed in the complete mess that is on the screen. This isn’t about being hurt because the movie takes the audience to awful and disturbing places, but being hurt because the movie is a nonsensical mess.

I also try to write these reviews based on my own experience viewing, but in the case of Le viol du vampire, I have to look at the notes that I have available to me. I watched this on Kanopy, and the synopsis is fascinating. I’m going to quote from it, because it will give you a solid idea of exactly how clown shoes this movie is: “Everyone on the crew was making their first film. All copies of the script managed to get lost within two days...The resulting film...is a glorious puzzlement.” This is very charitable. The resulting film is actually a confused mess of unfinished concepts and tits.

Ten Days of Terror! Monster Mash-Up!

I keep telling myself that I should post more and every now and then I post more frequently for like a week, and then life takes over again. It’s been that kind of a year, and my focus is pretty difused right now. However, a tradition is a tradition, and that means 40 posts in the final 10 days of October.

As usual, there’s a sort of theme to each day, as shown below. Reviews will go up at 1:00 and 7:00 AM and PM, Central time. So, here’s what’s coming:

We Have the Meats!

Film: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2
Format: Streaming video from Amazon Prime on Fire!

The original Texas Chainsaw Massacre is a singular film experience. It’s one of the scariest and most upsetting horror movies ever made, and shows a depth of directorial skill that Tobe Hooper didn’t show very often afterwards. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about it is that for a terrifying film about a family of cannibals who hack people up with chainsaws, the movie is almost entirely bloodless. Twelve years after the original film, Tobe Hooper directed the sequel, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, and he took this film in a very different direction, both in terms of tone and in terms of blood content.

Where the first film has plenty of violence, both on screen and implied but almost no blood, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 opts for full gore and guts. We’ll see heads split open, piles of intestines, and more. It’s also a film that is fully intended to be comic in a lot of places. There are clearly comedic elements attempted—very dark ones, to be sure—but comic nonetheless. It also features the talents of Dennis Hopper, who, until he was in the Super Mario movie, said that this was the worst film he ever made.

Grapefruit

Film: Bring Her Back
Format: Streaming video from HBO Max on Fire!

Some movies are hard to write about for a variety of reasons. It can be that the film doesn’t have a great deal of plot, which for me is problematic, since I tend to be concerned with narrative more than anything else. In the case of Bring Her Back, the problem is one of the actual story. There’s a lot here that I don’t want to reveal, not even under a spoiler tag. This is a movie that everyone should go into as cold as possible, and I don’t want to be the source of even potentially ruining that. So, I’m going to be talking more in generalities here, and won’t be exploring that far into the movie—even some of the details should be revealed here in the film itself, not on a blog.

What you should know (and probably do know, based on the title and the knowledge that this is a horror movie) is that this is a film about bringing someone back from the dead. If we’ve learned anything from literature based on this theme, we know that it’s always a terrible idea. We learned this from The Monkey’s Paw, Pet Sematary, and pretty much any book or film that involves bringing back the spirit of someone who has died. With the possible exception of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., it’s pretty much a universal.

Gone, but Not Forgotten

Film: I’m Still Here (Ainda Estou Aqui)
Format: DVD from Sycamore Public Library on basement television.

Some movies are harder to watch than others, and for various reasons. Because of the state of the U.S. right now, I’m Still Here (Ainda Estou Aqui in the original Portuguese) is a film that feels both relevant and terrifying. This is a film about political murder and authoritarianism, as well as military rule, and a lot of it feels a lot more relevant than it should.

As with many a film about a very serious issue, I’m Still Here has a sort of high-concept plot that is easy to understand and terrifying to watch play out. In 1964, Brazil was taken over in a coup d’état. Congressman Reubens Paiva (Selton Mello) resigned his position and returned to his position as a civil engineer. Several years later, Paiva is living peacefully with his family, but is privately supporting political expatriates without the knowledge of his family.

What I've Caught Up With, September 2025 Part 2

In August, I watched a number of shows, but didn’t complete any. That changed in September. I finished The Owl House and the first (and currently only) season of Batman: Caped Crusader. I also made my way through Succession, and finally got through The Expanse as my workout show.

The kerfuffle regarding Disney/Hulu and Jimmy Kimmel was distressing for a number of reasons. We were on the verge of cancelling both when Kimmel was brought back—and while I didn’t cancel either service, I did actually write and mail a physical letter to Disney. So far, no response, but that’s not too surprising. It has made me think that I will be pushing my way through a lot of Disney/Hulu over the next few months in the hopes of actually fully and finally cancelling both services.

What I've Caught Up With, September 2025 Part 1

September was, as seems to be the theme this year, not a great month. Professionally, it was fine, but personally, it looks like 2025 will be the year that I lose both of my parents, as my dad is now on hospice. Despite this, I did knock a few films off the list.